Last Night in Montreal Read Free Page A

those letters is, they come from these unbelievable places, and you know why?”
    “Because he’s somewhere else. Are you feeling okay?”
    “No, look, what I mean is the letters come from these unbelievable places because one day years ago he decided to travel, so he travels. He doesn’t talk about travel. He doesn’t theorize about travel. He just buys a ticket and goes. It isn’t the gallery that’s been bothering me, it’s the inaction,” Eli said. He was watching Geneviève returning to the table with her coffee. “All the theorizing we do. Everyone talks about being an artist, everyone theorizes about their art, but no one actually does anything. No one ever takes the leap.”
    “What leap?” Geneviève asked. She was considering him over the rim of her coffee mug.
    “They never do anything. We never do anything. I’m not saying I’m exempt from this. I always thought that once the thesis was done I’d be a writer and write, you know, really groundbreaking stuff in my field, but let’s be honest here, I’m never going to finish my thesis. I’ve been writing my thesis for six years, and I’ve been a third of the way in for four and a half of them. All I can do is talk about writing, theorize about writing, but I can’t take the leap, I can’t just write . But I still call myself a writer. What the hell do you call that, if not somehow fraudulent?”
    “And the rest of us?” asked Geneviève dangerously. She hadn’t painted anything in a while.
    Eli realized he was about to step on a land mine, and retreated.
    “Sorry. I’m rambling. Ignore me,” he said. He drew a long breath. “Look, I’m not naming names here, I’m not saying I know anything, it’s just hard not to notice that none of us are actually . . . I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. Forget it.”
    “It’s cool,” said Thomas warily.
    “Why is it bothering you now, ” Geneviève asked unpleasantly, “if you’ve been a third of the way in for that long?”
    “It’s my birthday on Thursday. I’ll be twenty-seven, and it dawned on me: twenty-seven. It’s been six or seven years since I’ve been a promising academic, or a promising anything, actually, and I think my school’s actually forgotten about me. I always wondered what would happen when I failed to meet my last thesis deadline, and then when it happened . . . my thesis deadline passed a year ago, and no one contacted me. No one. There was nothing. It’s like I’ve been struck from the school records, or like I don’t exist. And then when I think of Zed, doing things, I just don’t . . . Look,” he said, “I don’t want to talk about this. I think I’m going to go for the paper.”
    “You can get it here.”
    “And then sit in the park for a bit,” Eli said, ignoring this, “and then maybe go home and not write. Ciao.”
    Thomas waved. And he did hear Geneviève’s whispered What the hell’s wrong with him? as he walked out of the Third Cup Café into the brilliant sunlight of Bedford Avenue, but he ignored it. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment and decided not to go to the park after all, then walked slowly in a diagonal line across the deserted intersection and under the blue awning of the Café Matisse. There was a girl who read books there whom he wanted to meet.
    HIS THESIS DEADLINE passed like a signpost through a slow car window, like the last sign before the beginning of a trackless wilderness. For several nervous weeks after the circled date on the calendar, actually several nervous months, he had a falling sensation in his stomach every time the phone rang. It took some time to realize that no one was going to call him. He wasn’t about to call them. He ceased any pretense of being just on the verge of completing the document and immersed himself as completely as he could in research.
    Eli never felt particularly calm, or that he was moving even remotely in the correct direction. Still, he felt that